Pervert Park: Where Sex Offenders Try to Be Normal

No one is more of an outcast in modern society than sex offenders. Nobody wants to know them. Nobody wants to think about them. Everyone would prefer that sex offenders just go away. And due to the harsh laws around sex offenses, they more or less have gone away. Pervert Park, which airs Monday at 10 p.m. EST on the PBS series POV, found some of them, and it makes for uncomfortable viewing. The subject inherently makes the skin crawl. But it is necessary as well. There are 800,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and the main lesson Pervert Park teaches is the most essential: They are human beings.

Pervert Park follows the residents of Florida Justice Transitions, a housing program for sex offenders founded in 1996 by the mother of a convicted sex offender who couldn't find a place to live after leaving prison—by law, offenders are not allowed to live within a thousand feet of anywhere children congregate regularly.

The community at Pervert Park is a community of utterly destroyed lives. Bill Fuery, a man with the face of a beaten dog, is a typical member. His life has been a nightmare. He was fondled by a babysitter, beaten by his parents, abandoned at 15, and then witnessed his wife and one-year-old son killed by a tractor-trailer. After that, he lost control and collapsed into alcohol and drugs. He was convicted for masturbating in front of an underage girl.

His crime is right about in the middle on the spectrum of horrors at Pervert Park. Jamie Turner was arrested in an Internet sting at the age of 22 after he responded to an ad from a 30-year-old woman who claimed she wanted to watch him have sex with her 14-year-old daughter. He sent her a message playing along, and then showed up at her door. It was the police, and that was enough. He never touched anybody inappropriately. The prosecutor in his case offered no recommendation of a sentence, so weak did he feel the case was.

Lasse Barkfors

On the other end, there is Patrick Naughton: soft-spoken, naively sweet, a self-aware monster. He drove to Mexico and raped a five-year-old girl after luring her into his car. He is absolutely clear that he should not be allowed simply to reintegrate into ordinary human society. "People like me, I mean the violent people like me—there should be some labelling on us," he tells the interviewers. "For my tier, which I would say is one of the higher tiers of sex offenders, there needs to be some labelling, so that the police, so that people in their community know. Not to punish them. Not to bring them down. But for a way to help them. Make sure they don't reoffend." He's right. We need to make sure he is nowhere around anybody's five-year-old daughter. Ever.

The question of compassion hovers in the background throughout Pervert Park. The cycles of violence mean that every perpetrator is also a victim. Tracy Hutchinson was raped by her father and her mother's boyfriends. "It caused my body to want those same feelings, and I didn't know how to make myself feel those same feelings, except to act the same things on someone else," Hutchinson confesses. "So I did with my cousins. And my aunt tore off a tree branch and whipped me and whipped me and whipped me and told me I was going to hell. That was my second-grade year, because they took us away that year."

In the documentary's most heart-rending scene, Tracy describes how her father used promises of money to induce her to have sex with her own son in front of him. Then we learn that the son has already been arrested, at 13, for having sex with a three-year-old. And so it goes on.

Lasse Barkfors

The only hero in this whole story is Don Sweeney, the Park's therapist. He began as a representative for the victims of sexual crimes. In his contact with various sexual criminals, he found that they had no venue for treatment. "All we want to do is punish them, castrate them, and make their lives miserable," he says. "And a lot of people would say they deserve it, and maybe they do. But I'm a counselor. I believe in doing what's going to help, not hurt."

Pervert Park is an island of safety, an island surrounded by threat. The neighbors come by to call the residents names and to gaslight them in various ways—leaving a sack of fake rats in a dryer, for example. And of course, the options for work as a registered sexual offender are basically jobs that nobody would otherwise take.

Pervert Park isn't Hell and it isn't Heaven. It's just another place. Perhaps the most moving interview in the whole documentary belongs to the woman who founded the park. "Do you have a child? Do you think he's perfect?" she asks the interviewer, who answers yes to both questions. "But that child grows up, and that child does something bad and makes a mistake. Just one. Never to be forgiven." Pervert Park is full of unforgivable people, but the unforgivable is part of us, part of who we are collectively. And the unforgivable have to live somewhere, too.

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